Nothing Is Too Heavy For Love.

Posted on March 10, 2020 by Louise Gallagher

There are many names for it.

I call it fear.

Fear of being exposed. Seen. Known. Fear of diving deep into what lies beneath the surface of the words skimming the page. Fear of falling into the darkness and losing the light.

I feel this fear. It stalks me like a wolf slipping through the trees. Camouflaged by nature. Eyes peering out of the shadows. It follows my steps. Waiting.

I keep walking.

I do not want to stop and look for it. I want to pretend it’s not there. Not stalking me. Not waiting. I want to pretend it does not exist.

I am better than this, I tell myself.

And fear laughs. It knows better.

I want to turn around, go back, rewind time.

I want to rid my body of this urge to write, to tell the stories damning my arteries. I want to free myself from these chains.

“It’s not fear,” the voice inside my head, the one that loves me in all ways, even in my brokenness. quietly whispers. “It’s grief.”

I shrug my shoulders. dismissive. Angry. I step on a dried leaf lying on the forest floor. The crackling of its spindly spine breaking rustles in the silence.

Grief?

I want to laugh. To pretend I didn’t hear the voice. I want to run deeper into the forest where the peering eyes cannot see me. I want to become a tree. Silent. Rooted in nothing but soil and dirt.

I want to be invisible.

I can’t move.

“The river is struggling to flow free of unwritten words,” the voice whispers.

“I can’t,” I tell the voice.

“You know better.”

And I do. Know better. And I know nothing at all about this thing called grief.

“Grief is a river,” the voice whispers. Is it the trees? Is it the hawk skimming the water’s surface?

Is it the wolf?

I want to block my ears. Shut off my mind.

I open my mouth, “Damn that river.”

“You have,” the voice replies. There is no rancour in its words. no condemnation. Only patience. And love.

“It’s been a week,” I hiss. “I’m done with this.”

“Life is never done with you. Even after your death, life carries your spirit,” the voice lovingly replies. “It is carrying your mother now.”

I sink down onto my knees. The forest floor is damp. Musty.

I gather a bunch of dead leaves in my hands. I raise them up. A priestess extending an offering to the forest goddess. To the Great Mother.

A ray of sunlight splinters through the foliage above. I release the gathered leaves from my hands. Dust motes shimmer and dance where the light finds them drifting effortlessly to the ground.

Bowed beneath the weight of that which I cannot express, I press my forehead to the earth and breathe into the darkness of its mysteries, its beauty, its light, its life and its dying nature.

“I’m tired,” I whisper to the Great Mother of this earth upon which I kneel.

“Let me carry you,” she replies.

“I’m too heavy.” The words come out as a sigh. A plaintive whisper escaping on a breath of air.

“Nothing is too heavy for Love,” the Great Mother replies.

A ghostly breath of air, soft as a feather, brushes against my skin. The leaves rustle.

I rise up from where I kneel on the forest floor.

I turn and peer into the darkness of the trees around me. I spy the wolf’s eyes watching me.

“I see you,” I say. I take a breath. “I come in peace and in grief. I come in sorrow and in fear. No matter what I carry with me, I come in Love.”

The wolf blinks his great yellow eyes and slowly lowers himself to the forest floor. I watch his eyes close. He falls effortlessly into slumber.

Life whispers through the leaves of the trees moving in the gentle breeze that stirs their branches.

Life lays silently beneath my feet where fallen leaves decay.

Life is here. So is fear. Sorrow. Decay. Grief. Joy. Gratitude. Grace.

And always, Love.

I carry on through the forest. The wolf slumbers. The trees fall silent.

The Great Mother carries my weight with loving care. The earth holds me up.

Namaste.

____________________

Thank you DS for your call. Your words of love and encouragement. Your beauty and honesty.

I Am Woman.

Posted on March 9, 2020 by Louise Gallagher

No. 35 #ShePersisted Series
They said women are the weaker sex.
She kept giving birth to all humanity,
and with every child born unto man,
they witnessed the power of her strength.

I am woman.

I have borne the pains of birthing humankind so that we may all know life. I have forged my strength in the fires of the womb nurturing the unborn and tended to my compassion in the crucible of the pelvic bowl holding the sacred seeds of life.

I have climbed the manmade mountains designed to keep me in my place and risen above the fear of falling to my knees beneath the crushing weight of man’s desire to own me.

I have been forced to bow beneath the blows of patriarchy forcing me to kneel at its altars.

I have lived beneath the crushing death of believing I am not strong enough, good enough, do not do enough, and will never be enough because I am not a man. I am not his equal.

No more.

I have been forced to hide my feminine aspects and don the robes of conformity to not make those who feared my strength and my beauty feel ill at ease in my presence. I have been forced to witness the desecration of my sisterhood throughout the dark ages of our humanity where women’s voices were silenced and women’s work became the fodder for genocide, colonialization, subjugation and patriarchy.

No more.

I am woman.

I am the fertile womb conceiving life on this planet throughout time. I am the strength of all my grandmother’s grandmothers who bore life before me.

I am woman.

Midwife to the fires of creation, birthed from the womb of the Great Mother who bears us all, I have suckled at her breast and suckled others at mine.

I nurture life into being. I tend to the fires of our humanity.

I am woman.

I am a gatherer. I am a creator. I am the vessel through which all men are born. I am the milk that sustains us. The crucible that holds our humanity safe.

I wear my feminine aspects like a star-studded cloak shimmering in the light of a new moon rising.

I am woman.

I have risen. I am rising.

I shall always rise.

I am woman.

A Saturday Morning Haiku: Grief is a River

Image

Is this grief?

Posted on March 6, 2020 by Louise Gallagher

Mum throughout the decades

Thoughts collide with one another in my head. I want to write them out. I don’t know how. I don’t know what they are. I just don’t know.

Is this grief?

Is this what happens after the one who brought you into the world dies?

I wrote to someone this morning that the one thing I didn’t want to do while giving my mother’s eulogy was to cry in front of everyone. I wanted to honour her in ways I couldn’t in real life.

My mother’s relationship and mine was very complex. It wasn’t that we fought. It’s just we couldn’t agree on how to live life in peace.

I wanted to talk everything out. My mother wanted me to just ‘let things go’.

I can’t let go of what I do not understand, I’d tell her. I cannot let go of what is not named.

You just want to make trouble, she’d tell me. Let the past lie in silence.

Growing up I wanted her to be the mother of television shows. You know, the one who had fresh baked cookies waiting for you when you came home from school. The one who gave really good advice even when it related to boys — my mother’s advice tended to extend to practicalities like, ‘keep your legs crossed and definitely don’t let boys touch you…. there’, ‘always wear clean underwear in case you’re in an accident’ and ‘don’t sit on cold concrete. you’ll get hemorrhoids’.

I wanted a martini toting, laughing and giggling, outrageous, belle of the ball kind of mum.

She wanted an obedient, dutiful, listen to me kind of daughter.

I was none of those.

Years ago, when my daughters were about five and six, I knew I had to do something to heal my relationship with my mother. So, after much deliberation, I went to visit my parents to ask my mother to tell me her life story.

She was eager to do so. When we sat down, I turned on my dictaphone (remember those?) and she began to speak. “I was born in Pondicherry, India.” And she began to cry.

My father, not one for tears, kept walking into the room and telling her to stop crying.

I kept offering her kleenex.

She ignored us both and kept telling her story. For two and a half hours.

At the end, I understood better.

It wasn’t that she didn’t love me, or want me to be happy, or want a relationship with me, (which were some of the things I told myself, and my therapist, were the problems in our relationship.) It was just, she wanted the world to be for me like it was for her, or at least as she remembered it, when she was growing up in Pondicherry, India.

She called it her Shangri-la. She had God. Family. Friends and a beautiful way of life.

She wanted the same for me and my siblings. Being the rebel whose nickname growing up was, The Brat, I didn’t want what she had. Especially her faith, which I told her was a patriarchal construct designed to keep men in power and women subservient. (I know. It was the mean feminist in me. The one who didn’t understand way back then the power of words and the need for kindness.)

Without God as my ballast, my mother was terrified for me. Scared that I would get hurt in that great big scary world over which she had no control. Scared I would lose myself, and without surrendering to God’s will, my will would lead me into temptation, trials and tribulations.

It wasn’t until I was working on the powerpoint for her celebration of life and the eulogy that I realized that my mother and I weren’t that different. We might have used different words, but we both want/wanted the same thing. Peace. Love. and Harmony.

Once upon a time I wanted my mother to be the mother I wanted.

I am so grateful she was the mother she was. She taught me the value of kindness and helped me grow into the woman I am today.

My mother believed. Deeply. She believed that God would never forsake her. That God would lead the way.

Because of her deep faith, I always knew I was never alone in this Universe.

Because she never lost faith in God, I learned to never lose faith in myself. I learned that kindness is the ripple that creates a better world, act by act.

And above all, I learned that it’s not words that transform the past and relationships and the world. It’s Love.

Cheerio Kid

Posted on March 5, 2020 by Louise Gallagher

It is Tuesday morning. The day of our mother’s celebration of life.

I am sitting at my desk, working on finishing touches to the powerpoint of her life. I had been struggling with the second song to go with the photos. My brother-in-law had asked that I ensure we use Edith Piaf’s Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien, which my sisters and I all agreed was perfect. I didn’t want to play it twice (the presentation was 4 and a half minutes long) but ‘the song’ hadn’t come to me.

Until 5 am that morning when I heard a voice whisper in my head, “What about Esther and Abi Ofarim’s version of In the Morning?”

Thanks mum!

I got up and began working on finding a version I could download and include.

Around 8, when my sister, Anne, got up, I played it for her.

Immediately, tears started to flow and she agreed. It was perfect. We had sung and danced to that song when living in Europe and later, whenever my daughters were with us at my eldest sister’s home for dinner, we would play it and we’d all dance and we’d tell stories of our ‘growing up years’.

We were not dancing this morning. But my sister and I were moved by the song and its capacity to transport us back through time.

And that’s when the magic happened.

As Anne is listening, eyes closed, tears streaming down her face, I looked out the window in front of my desk and saw him.

The Coyote.

I’m pretty sure he’s the same one I wrote about on January 30th, my youngest daughter’s birthday. This time, he doesn’t just glance up and move off, he stands at the fence that separates our yard from the riverbank and watches me closely.

It is as if he too is listening intently.

My sister and I watch. He watches back. A long time.

And then, he turns and walks slowly away.

It’s then that we see her. She is waiting slightly upriver. Hidden in the trees. His companion. His partner. His soulmate.

My sister and I watch the two coyotes lope off through the trees together.

We are both crying.

In the big tin box I have of mum’s keepsakes, the box Anne and I have been going through for photos for the powerpoint, there is a stack of letters and poetry dad wrote to her during WWII after they were married. In his missives, he often called her ‘kid’ or signed off with, “Cheerio, kid.” He also promised that, no matter what, he would be coming back to India for her. And in 1945 after the war ended, he did. Come back for her.

I wonder now if that lone coyote was also a sign. Our mother was growing tired. The signs were there. She was becoming more and more weary of this life on the earthly plane. Dad was waiting for her.

During the war, our mother waited patiently to be reunited with her beloved Louis. He died almost 25 years before her and she believed with her heart of hearts that they would one day be united.

On Tuesday morning, two coyotes loped off through the forest that lines the river in front of our home. One stands hidden in the trees, waiting patiently. The other comes and stands outside my window. He is listening and watching. And, when he turns to go I hear a voice say, “Cheerio kids. “I’ve got her. She’s safe.”

All Things Are Possible

Posted on February 28, 2020 by Louise Gallagher

Iris as a little girl.

Lent leading up to Good Friday and Easter Sunday were very important and sacred times to our mother. To give up her earthly body on Shrove Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, was a testament to her faith and her belief of the forgiveness of sins through penitence and prayer. For our mother, there could be no holier time than this to ascend to be with her Father and those she loves.

As a child, I remember my sister Anne and I going to the church on Friday evenings and helping my mother change the flowers. She loved flowers and looked upon her duty of keeping the altar and church filled with beauty as a sacred trust.

Anne and I would rather have been out playing but mom insisted we attend to the needs of the church first, especially during Easter season.

Solemnly we’d kneel with her in front of the altar, pray a rosary and then, help remove the deadened flowers from each bouquet. My job was to place each dead flower on a sheet of paper, wrap them up carefully so that no stray leaves or petals fell out and carry them to the waste bin in the church offices. Older and bigger than me, Anne was allowed to carry the water-filled vases to the sink and empty them.

Then again, Anne’s being allowed to carry the glass vases may have had nothing to do with age and size and everything to do with the fact my mother knew she could trust Anne to take her job seriously. Me. Well… She probably feared I’d try to dance with the vase in my hands or even sprinkle the water on the floor of the sacristy like a priest sprinkling holy water on a penitent’s forehead.

I liked to play in the make-believe. My mother never quit praying that one day I’d learn to keep my feet on the ground.

She often felt I was too irreverent, too wild by nature, too free-spirited and strong-willed. I can still hear her cautioning me to ‘be careful’. To take heed. To watch my words, my steps, and even my dreams.

She wasn’t big on dreaming. Life was meant to be lived in the service of God. It was serious business, too weighty for dreams to take flight. Life, for my mother, was about living by God’s will. Walking humble. Staying true to her faith and being His servant here on earth.

She was ‘pure of heart’. She held no hypocrisy. No guile. No hidden motives. She dedicated her life to God and through extension, to her family and community.

She imbued the spirit of the Church she loved so much. She wore its traditions and rituals, its liturgy and songs like a beautiful velvet robe of grace and sacred service.

She told me once that most of the gold and silver jewellery she carried with her from India when she left to build a life with my father at the end of WWII was sold off in the early days of their marriage. Times were tough in those days and she had to do what needed to be done to take care of her family.

There was no regret in her voice for the loss of her jewels. Family always came first.

What never left her possession, however, was the rosary and wooden crucifix her father gave her as a child, and the statue of her beloved Saint Teresa of Avila. They had travelled the seas and continents with her, always finding a place at her bedside no matter where in the world she was.

Like Saint Teresa, my mother prayed for peace. Of heart. In her family. In the world.

She prayed for her Church. For her family and everyone she knew.

My mother prayed. Always.

It is one of the things I admire most about her and hold in awe.

No matter the challenges, no matter her losses, her sorrow, my mother never gave up her faith.

She also never gave up praying I would learn to keep my feet on the ground.

It’s something I never had to learn how to do, keep my feet on the ground. I am blessed. My life has been grounded in the constancy and faithfulness of my mother’s prayers.

This morning I sit at my desk, tears flow and my heart breaks open, filled with the beautiful gift of my mother’s prayers. I know, deep within my being, my mother is looking down on me now, clicking her rosary beads in an endless circle of love, whispering her words of benediction and praying I keep dancing and laughing, living and loving with all my heart.

My mother is praying I have faith. In Love. In God. In her prayers.

She is praying I live my life in kindness, grace and Love.

It’s what she prays for all of us because she believes, like St Teresa of Avila, all things are possible.

A Song For My Mother

Posted on February 27, 2020 by Louise Gallagher

In our home growing up, there were many icons of Mother Mary, Jesus, many Saints and the Hindu goddess/god Shiva. There were also carved elephants, always with their trunks turned up and tails linked and other lesser gods of the land where she was born.

Our mother was deep of faith, and very superstitious.

We used to tease her that she was covering her bases. She graciously let us tease her and continued to pray to her Lord, the Father and Mother Mary while Shiva sat in the corner watching.

She would never put shoes on a bed or table. Never walk under a ladder. Never cross knives nor stir with one for as she used to say, “Stir with a knife, stir up strife.”

Our mother did not like strife. She did not yell. Cry out in anger, nor take the Lord’s name in vain. Though once, we did hear her say, “Oh eat it,” in response to some comment our brother had made that caused her to flinch. We laughed when she said it. She had no idea what it meant.

My sister Anne and I used to try to get around our mother’s aversion to profanity. We’d say, “Oh hel…………p”, spitting out the ‘P’ like it was a stone caught in our throats. We’d laugh gleefully thinking we were putting one over on her.

I don’t think we did. I think she just preferred not to hear what did not please her ears.

She never liked loud noises nor angry words. She used to always tell us that, “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.”

I didn’t often heed my mother’s words when I was young. I thought truth-telling meant only my truth mattered. That my truth gave me the right to speak my mind without regard for the feelings of those to whom I spoke.

At times, I flung my words at my mother like daggers to her soul. I cannot take those words back and long ago learned to forgive myself for my harsh ways.

Today, I take my mother’s words to heart and hold them near. In their nearness I find myself falling with grace into the space she always held with her belief that God would answer her prayers for each of us to know how much she loved us. She didn’t care if Shiva watched, or we teased her for her faith and superstitions. She was imbued with the spirit of knowing within the depths of her soul, that He loved her, cared for her and lead her in Love.

Thank you, mom, for the lessons in Love, for your steadfast faith in me. Thank you for loving me as I was so that I could grow with grace into gratitude for all that I am and all the Love that fills my world with such wonder and beauty, today and always.

We played this song for my mother as she lay sleeping. Alexis, my eldest daughter, who like mum, has the voice of an angel. She recorded an acapella version of it. It brought great comfort and ease to my mother while she slept and listened to the voice of one of her granddaughters.

The Celebration of our mother’s life will be held at 2pm, Tuesday, March 3rd at McInnis & Holloway,14441 Bannister RD. S.E. Calgary.

In The Eternity Of My Mother’s Prayers

Posted on February 26, 2020 by Louise Gallagher

Iris Marie (nee Dartnell) Gallagher
August 30, 1922 – February 25, 2020

The calls came while I was at the park with Beaumont. I hadn’t heard them. My youngest daughter. My beloved. They called several times. My phone was on silent, as is my habit when out in nature.

For some reason, though we’d been sitting vigil with my mother for over a week, I hadn’t expected it to come so soon. As I told my sisters, “I was expecting some sort of sign, some warning that mum was about to take her last breath.”

Instead, mum did it her way. No fuss. No inconveniencing of others.

At the time of mum’s last breath, I was walking along the river on my way home, the sun warm against my face, the fresh breeze caressing my skin. Later, I was planning on driving out to spend the night with mum.

Jackie, our eldest sister, was drying her hair and getting dressed to go spend the day at mum’s bedside.

Anne, our middle sister, was sitting by mum’s bedside, drinking her second cup of coffee of the morning. We’d been taking turns spending the night and Monday was her night.

And then, without ceremony or fuss, at 10:35 am yesterday morning, my mother took her last inhale.

Anne waited for the exhale.

It never came.

And in that one inhale this tiny, kind woman who travelled far from her motherland of India to the other side of the world to give life to four children. Who no matter how complicated and hard her life, was always kind. Who believed in God with all her being and prayed nightly for her daughters, the souls’ of her lost loved ones, her brothers and sisters, for those who are gone and those who are still here, is gone.

This fiercely protective and often stubborn matriarch for whom the world sometimes seemed too harsh and cruel, has left her earthly body to return to the spirit realm of her deep faith.

In her passing, I envision the endless ribbon of prayers she offered up to God in a constant entreaty for good-tidings, peace and health for all, entwining the earth and all of humankind in Love.

It was my mother’s insistence she would pray for me that used to drive me crazy. In days long past, I’d hear those words and want to tell her to keep her prayers for herself. I’d take care of myself.

Age and time, not to mention a whole lot of therapy, helped me understand and appreciate her prayers as what they truly were, and still are – A gift of Love. Her way of saying, “I love you. Even when you make it difficult.”

Because my mother did. Love all of us. Even when we made it difficult.

And in these difficult days following her passing, it is her Love we carry. Her Love that remains. Her Love that fills each of our hearts and memories with gratitude.

My mother crossed over the Rainbow Bridge yesterday.

She took her final breath quietly. It was imbued with the grace by which she lived her life.

She is home.

This morning, I watch the sky bruised pink and violet by the rising sun and imagine my mother dancing with her brothers, sharing a smile and a cup of tea with my father and embracing the son she lost before his time.

I imagine her holding a rosary in her no longer crippled fingers, counting off the tiny round beads as she prays each decade. And as she did every night of her life, she prays for her children, her family and all those left behind on this earthly realm. Gently, she places her rosary into the folds of the ethereal gown that floats and flows around her body like angel’s wings, turns back into the circle of Love to which she has been eternally enjoined to dance like the whole world is watching. Sing like the whole world is listening. And Love like the whole world is beating as one with her heart.

That is what I believe my mother is doing now in the eternity of her life ever-after.

Namaste.

_______________________________

I had no intention of writing this morning and then, I heard my mother’s voice whispering how much my words meant to her.

There was a time, I never thought they mattered.

Now I know.

And so, I wrote.

My Mother’s Hands

Posted on February 25, 2020 by Louise Gallagher

My Mother’s Hands

These hands
that have been worn through time
their knuckles swollen and distorted
by years of living and caring and praying.

These hands
that have feasted on joy
and been consumed by sorrow
that have collected tears
and rainwater in their cupped palms
and washed clothes and floors
and sprinkled flour on a counter
to make pie crusts roll out
in round circles of perfection.

These hands
have never fallen idle
in the passing of years.
They have carried me
soothed me
fed me.
They have pulled back my hair
when I was sick
and stroked my back
while I lay sleeping.

These hands have woven stories in the air
with their dancing insistence, they can speak
without words
they have given benediction and disapproval
without sound
always silently carrying
the burdens
of a past hurt, a long-ago pain.
In their silence
they have grown tired and weary.

They are resting now
these hands
that do not need to knock
at the door of eternity
for these wise and loving hands
know God is waiting
at the open door of the eternal beyond.

These hands are resting now.
They lie silently on the heart of my mother
who rests at this sacred threshold
as if to catch her breath in the here and now
before crossing over
into the forever after.

These hands are resting now.
Soon, they will be at peace forevermore.